Three more

Wednesday’s attacks all took place in the restive western frontier province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa – one just outside the city of Peshawar and two others in the town of Charsadda. Two men and a woman have been killed.

The volunteers were taking part in a three-day government-led drive, supported by the World Health Organisation and Unicef, to vaccinate tens of millions of children at risk from polio in Pakistan.

After a decades-long struggle by multilateral organisations, governments and NGOs worldwide, the disease is now endemic only in three countries: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.

Thank you Allah.

Women health workers held protests in Karachi and the capital, Islamabad. “We go out and risk our lives to save other people’s children from being permanently handicapped, for what? So that our own children become orphans?” Ambreen Bibi, a health worker, said at the Islamabad protest.

Comments

This is the pull quote for me: “However there has been a severe backlash against immunisation for polio and other diseases in Pakistan since the CIA used a local doctor to set up a fake vaccination programme as the agency closed in on Osama bin Laden in his hiding place in the northern town of Abbottabad last year.”

This particular tragedy I would lay at the feet of US interventionism and not Allah, unfortunately. The CIA may have irreparably damaged people’s trust in vaccination, and public health as a whole—it’s not coincidental that out of the three nations where polio is still endemic, two of them have been extensively meddled with in the global war on terror.

It’s one, I agree. I almost did pull it, in fact I did but then deleted it because it was discussed yesterday and I wanted to highlight the campaigner and what she said. It’s one, but the one? I say no.

The CIA shouldn’t have done that, but then bin Laden shouldn’t have done what he did, either. (And the US shouldn’t have helped him fight the Soviets, either; true.)

The Taliban or whatever group or splinter is murdering anti-polio workers could just decide to take the risk, after all, on the grounds that eradicating polio would be a good thing while protecting their murderous theocratic tyrants is not a good thing. Obviously they’re not going to decide that, but they could.

And the bullshit about immunization as a Western plot to make Muslims sterile predates what the CIA did by years. I’ve been following it for years.